Helping People Breathe Healthier Indoor Air with Dr. John McKeon

Sep 28, 2023

As an emergency room doctor, John McKeon often recommended allergy and asthma-friendly products to his patients. One patient’s mother, while trying to take in all the details, told him it would be so nice if someone would just put a label on these products so that she could know which ones met his specs. That single comment was enough to ignite the latent entrepreneurial tendencies that John had always had.

Now, John is the CEO of Allergy Standards Ltd (ASL), a company on a mission to help people breathe healthier indoor air. John and his team do this through science (ASL Standards), education (iAIR Academy), and innovation (iAIR Institute).

On this episode, we talk with John about his journey from the expected path of being a medical doctor to his inevitable path as a serial entrepreneur and business leader. This, of course, was not an easy endeavor but John knew there was value in going upstream and addressing health problems at the root cause.

We discuss key learnings along the way, including:

• How key partnerships can lend credibility to early-stage companies.
• The challenges of measuring the ROI of prevention and dealing with its extremely long feedback loop.
• How to use leading measures or KPIs to support your claims while keeping an eye on the longer-term clinical and economic outcomes.
• The process and science behind ASL’s certification, verification, and licensing.
• Finding the intersection of business and health that allows you to do well by doing good.
• Confronting the realities of economics and resource allocation in healthcare.
• The psychology of business and behavior change
• The importance of whole-brain thinking in innovation

This is a wide-ranging conversation and John shared a ton of insights from his journey that will be useful to all of you who are out there innovating, building, and trying to make a difference.

For full show notes and links, visit: https://deepdive.tips